Have you seen the statistics for LGBT youth homelessness?  They’re heartbreaking.  Monstrous.  Criminal.  This 2009 fact sheet from the National Coalition for the Homeless puts LGBT teens at 20% of the overall homeless youth population.  A more recent study by the Williams Institute puts the number at more like 40%.  Think about that for a minute.  As much as 40% of the homeless teen population is LGBT, but according to this recent Gallup poll, only 3.5% of US adults identify as LGBT.  Assuming those numbers hold true for teens and young adults, that 40% of the homeless youth population comes from only 3.5% of the total youth population.  That’s a boatload of the LGBT community dealing with homelessness.  According to this 2010 article, the average age that a gay or lesbian teen in New York becomes homeless is 14.4.  For a trans* teen it’s 13.5.  And the top two reasons for all this homelessness?  Runaway due to family rejection and forced out due to family rejection.

It makes me want to vomit.

But I didn’t write this to make you all want to vomit on sunny Sunday, too.  I heard about something that I wanted to pass on.  Lost & Found is an anthology from Featherweight Press with royalties going to Lost-n-Found Youth, Inc., an organization that works with homeless LGBT youth.

I know we’re all readers here, so grab a copy of the anthology.  And consider making a donation to Lost-n-Found or another organization in your area that works with this population.  Money, time, material goods, a signal boost.  These kids need help.  Let’s do what we can to provide it.

ETA: For those who prefer to order from third party sites, Lost & Found is now available on Amazon.  I’ll update with links as it becomes available from other retailers.

Michael, an alien teenager from the television series, Roswell, said it best when he said, “There is no such thing as normal.” Right from the start of my life I was a unique kid. Sure, I was born female and I dreamed of becoming Rainbow Brite when I grew up, but I also loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, didn’t play with dolls and hated dresses with a passion. I should have known I’d “end up” under the rainbow. My favorite color has always been The Rainbow, after all.

The trip to the department store for my first bra was an awkward experience. I saw no need for this uncomfortable THING that put me in a category where I could get pregnant and have all the physical trappings that went with being a woman. Um, no thanks. I said I didn’t want a bra, didn’t want boobs, but neither did I want something dangling between my legs, if I’d been given a choice. How do you comfortably wear pants with a penis? That thing would get in the way, as far as I could tell, and embarrass the hell out of you if you got hard in public. I definitely didn’t need any of those things.

When I told my mom and my best friend that I didn’t want to be either a girl or a boy they didn’t understand. And if they couldn’t understand, how could anyone else? I didn’t seem to have a choice about getting a bra, so we settled on sports bras, though my mother was unhappy about it. I figured I didn’t have a choice about being a girl in general either, so I let the subject drop and didn’t revisit it for nearly twenty years.

When asking for my gender, most websites and printed forms don’t give any options outside the binary male and female. You don’t even get the option to opt out. This is one of my biggest pet peeves. The least they could do is let me not answer the question. But they don’t. Yet, when registering for GLSEN’s (Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network) Day of Silence just a few years ago, I found they had a long list of genders and “androgynous” was included. I prefer the term “gender neutral” but they mean the same thing. I’d thought I was the only one in the world for so long I figured I was just a woman wanting something I couldn’t have. It was nice to know there had to be other people out there like me for GLSEN to include that option on their website.

Even after finding the gender list, I still wondered if there was something a bit wrong with me for awhile. Eventually my mind settled, though it was a long time in coming, and then I couldn’t not think about how I was outside the gender binary and no one knew it. I would think hard about it so much I thought my head would explode. But to tell someone about it was a frightening idea because, a) how do you explain something like being gender neutral? and b) if I said something to someone, that meant it was true and I couldn’t take it back. That being said, I came out online under my penname first. It was a huge decision, not knowing how anyone would react, and still feeling alone in the fact that I didn’t know anyone else who identified the same way. When no one questioned it, I was reassured. The next step was telling family and friends, which didn’t happen right away, or very easily.

Coming out is never easy. I spent months agonizing over who needed to know first and my aunt was pretty high on the list as well as one of my gay friends. I wasn’t sure where my parents fell on the list, and I was pretty sure my immediate colleague at work needed to know. When I marched in the pride parade last June for work, my aunt surprisingly came out in support of me, thinking that because of my clothing choices and short hair I must be a lesbian. (I get that a lot.) She was the first person in my family to officially acknowledge that I wasn’t in the majority, out loud, and I still couldn’t tell her the truth, but I knew I couldn’t let her go on forever without knowing.

I told one of my best gay friends first and was nervous as hell. I knew he would understand a little bit of what I was going through and I wanted that reassurance my first time saying something. I’m sure I shocked him a bit, but he was great and took it in stride. His first question, after asking if my closet now had room for more clothes, was to ask what my pronoun preference was. This was another reason I hadn’t wanted to tell anyone for awhile. There is no set of gender neutral pronouns in the English language. In place of those, many people use the pronouns created by author, Mary Gentle, for her fantasy novel Golden Witchbreed written in 1985. Even those are often spelled in many different ways. I thought I would wait until something was finally settled on, but that might not happen until I’m 90 and dying, and waiting that long makes no sense. For now, I’m staying with the pronouns I was born with, even if I don’t like them much. It’s easier than explaining to the world why they need to refer to me by a set of words they’re likely to forget easily.

Before telling someone, I’ve found it helps to read something inspirational. It gives you something to talk about, to introduce your topic of conversation. When I told my parents, I’d just read the chapter about transgendered kids in the book Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon. Those young kids were so inspirational to me, I thought, if they could do it, so could I. When I told my coworker, I had just finished reading Beautiful Music For Ugly Children, a novel for teens by Kirstin Cronn-Mills. This is the story of a transgendered teen boy who wants to become a radio DJ. When I was in middle school, I wanted to be a DJ when I grew up. It didn’t happen, but I still dream about it, so that novel really hit home for me, and gave me the strength to tell my friend and coworker the truth. And when I told my gay best friend, I bought him dinner. I forced myself to do something somewhat out of the ordinary so that I couldn’t back out and change my mind. And telling him gave me the strength to sit down and write an email to my aunt.

I’m considering wearing chest binders these days and though I came out later in my life than I’d have liked, I’m feeling much better for having done so.

I don’t fit the norm people think of when they see me. I get called Miss, Ma’am, and even Sir on occasion, at work. No one knows what to make of me and that actually makes me smile. Sometimes even the label I gave myself doesn’t enter my brain. For the most part, I’m just me, unique in a million different ways. I have a record collection, a shot glass collection (though I don’t drink), I read and write M/M Romance novels, dream of owning a Greyhound someday, wish there was a horse in my future too, and yes, I wear the same kind of combat boots worn by Navy SEALs every day. In short, I’m just me.
___________________
Jordan Sophia Lombard
http://www.JordanLombard.wordpress.com

Now it’s time for the trans* community and its allies to think about giving back.  Please support the Help Kate Bornstein Stay Alive campaign if you can.  And spread the word.  Even with insurance, cancer treatment is expensive as hell, and we want Auntie Kate with us, advocating for equality and suicide prevention and inspiring us all, for a long time to come.

On top of the feel-good of helping someone who has made a difference in the world, we’re going to offer a thank you, too.  The first five people who donate at the Kate’s Cabbie level or higher, and then come back here and comment to let us know, can take their pick of a Kindle copy of any of Kate’s books.  (If there’s a problem with geo restrictions, or if you don’t have a Kindle, we’ll work something out.)  For the first person who donates at the No More Nausea level or higher and comments to let us know, we’ll pre-order you a paperback copy of Kate’s soon-to-be-released My New Gender Workbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving World Peace Through Gender Anarchy and Sex Positivity.

So go forth and donate.  Spread the word.  Do good deeds.  Fuck cancer.  And help Auntie Kate Stay Alive.

In other words, I had exactly the experience I hope to find in a romance novel, with a side order of increased awareness.  These characters and their experiences stuck with me over the months since I first read it, and they held up when I read it again for this discussion.  And I haven’t hesitated to read about a trans* character since.

Here’s what Laney had to say about Circle of Change:

Circle of Change is an early novel, written before I had professionally published anything apart from a handful of short stories, and published later. The novel was intended originally as an exercise in experimenting with structure, which I was exploring at the time. I was intrigued by the idea of an artificially imposed framework, in the form of the year of Wiccan rituals, and the challenge of working a standard romance plot around that framework. I’ve never returned to that kind of structure for another novel, but I recall the writing process as being a positive experience, without much of the three quarter mark plot flailing I had been prone to until then.

I wanted to play with the trope of the inspirational romance, adapting the more conventional inspirational romance plot structure and writing a novel that I would actually want to read. I don’t live in a spiritual vacuum, and I enjoy reading books that reflect this. However, not all of my books that have religiously observant characters in them are actually inspirational romances. Jude, from The Tockleys, is a Buddhist, but the story of The Tockleys is not dependent on Jude finding insight or consolation from his religious practices. Kim and Dash, in Circle of Change, however, can’t find each other until Dash finds his own truth through Wicca. I think there should be more Wiccan inspirational romances.

Since I’ve come out as genderqueer, I do feel like Circle of Change has in some way become more respectable as a book. Obviously, I’m the same person I was when I wrote it, just now with more mileage on. And Circle of Change is still a romance novel about Kim and Dash. But readers don’t necessarily read books in a vacuum, and if I’m around at conventions or online, being visibly genderqueer, then it is going to alter how people read Circle of Change. If I wrote Circle of Change (or another gender/trans novel) now I’m publicly genderqueer, I’d write something different I think. With a really, really happy ending. And more, better, sex. I would like as much validation and joy as possible. Stories about us should be stories about people having *awesome* lives.

I’m all for people having awesome lives.  But in my opinion, the ending of Circle is just right.  Hopeful, but not settled.  Not finished, because the wheel of the year keeps turning, and there will be new challenges, new journeys, new opportunities for growth.  It ends in a balanced moment for both the characters and the year.  A perfect ending point for the structure of the book. And Kim and Dash are so young.  I want to believe that they will have a long and amazing relationship, but it’s too soon for them to have a Happily Ever After type ending.

So, now it’s you’re turn.  What did you think of the book?  Did you notice how Dash’s experiences with the coven paralleled his growing relationship with Kim?  And what did you think of Kim?  Was there a particular moment in the story that really stands out to you?

Let’s hear it!

Kim is in his last year of high school and just hopes to make it through the year without running into any gay bashing. The thing is, Kim is not only gay, but he’s transgender, too. He’s unhappy and lost in his female body, and his mother has agreed it’s time for him to undergo hormone therapy and possibly surgery.

Things get even more complicated when university student Dash joins Kim’s mother’s coven. Dash is immediately attracted to Kim and they wind up going out together, but when Kim reveals he’s a female to male transgender, Dash reacts badly.

With all the other things going on in their lives, will Kim and Dash be able to try again and find happiness with each other?

The discussion post will go up on September 20th.  That’s coming up fast, so dig those copies out of your TBR or Keeper files.  If you don’t already have a copy, you can pick one up from the publisher, or you can pick one up from all the usual suspects.

Amazon  Barnes & Noble  ARe  Fictionwise  Kobo

I really hope you’ll join us for what promises to be an excellent discussion.  If it goes well, we’ll probably have more.  So be sure to shoot us a message through the Contact tab if you have a recommendation for future book clubs.

Now, go get reading!

The excerpt was from an article written by Judith Butler, which provides an analysis of Simone de Beauvior’s work Second Sex.

I found the piece fascinating not only because of its discussion of the concepts of gender, its construction and its interpretation, but perhaps more significantly of the inherent constraints of becoming a gender or even genderless within the very same society that produced these norms – including gender behaviours – in the first place.

It reminded me of Alice Dreger’s lecture entitled ‘Is Anatomy Destiny?’ (here) and Kit Yan’s performance piece ’3rd Gender’ (here); both of which challenge the binary mindset and break down some of the the barriers between anatomy, sexuality and gender as well as the societal, cultural, religious, political and ideological forms to reveal how confining they really are.

If you haven’t had the opportunity as yet, I encourage you to view the above links and to read Judith Butler’s article.

In the meantime, I will leave you with part of the quote from Butler’s work that inspired me to post about it.  Please feel free to share your thoughts and responses.  I would be very interested to read them.

Simone de Beauvoir does not directly address the burden of freedom ⁸ that gender presents, but we can extrapolate from her view how constraining norms work to subdue the exercise of gender freedom. The social constraints upon gender compliance and deviation are so great that most people feel deeply wounded if they are told that they are not really manly or womanly, that they have failed to execute their manhood or womanhood properly. Indeed, insofar as social existence requires an unambiguous gender affinity, it is not possible to exist in a socially meaningful sense outside of established gender norms. The fall from established gender boundaries initiates a sense of radical dislocation which can assume a metaphysical significance. If existence is always gendered existence, then to stray outside of established gender is in some sense to put one’s very existence into question. In these moments of gender dislocation in which we realize that it is hardly necessary that we be the genders we have become, we confront the burden of choice intrinsic to living as a man or a woman or as some other gender identity, a freedom made burdensome through social constraint.

Judith Butler, ‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvior’s Second Sex‘, in Simone de Beauvior: Witness to a Century, Yale French Studies, No. 72, Winter 1986, English edition, pp. 35 – 49.

Transgendered 20-year-old Lukas is going through gender reassignment treatment, a process eased by his friendship with the lesbian Ine. As Ine introduces him to Cologne’s gay scene, Lukas sees his romantic opportunities open up.

That got me wondering.  Does anyone else have recommendations for movies with trans* characters or documentaries that do a good job discussing gender variation?  The Butch Factor wasn’t about trans* individuals, but they did ask gay men to define for themselves what it means to be a man, which I found to be food for thought.  And here’s one that I found absolutely fascinating: 100% Woman.  It’s about Michelle Dumaresq, a Canadian downhill mountain bike champion, and her struggle to be accepted as a competitor in national and international events.  Unbelievably, the organizational bodies accepted her pretty quickly.  It was her fellow racers who seemed to give her the most grief.  I haven’t found a good source for this one– it’s not available on Netflix, and I’m not finding it for sale in stores.  It might be available on the Logo TV website.  I can’t get it to come up, but I can’t tell if the problem is on my end or theirs.  There is distribution information on the website linked above, and you might be able to get your own copy there.  Otherwise, my best suggestion is to keep an eye out for it to air again on Logo or a similar channel in your area.

So, what movies or documentaries do you recommend?  (With luck, something that’s a little easier to get a hold of!)

Thanks to everyone who came by and left such great comments, and a big thank you to L.A. for giving us a behind the scenes look at the writing of this book.

Not this time. Static was one of those all-consuming stories. A concentration vortex, if you will.  I was working on Infinity Pools at the time, which wasn’t dragging at all, but I put it aside because Static would not. Shut. Up.

As stories often do, it came to me while I was driving. I was on my way to a mall near my apartment in Japan, planning to get some writing done in the food court, and my brain started wandering. I’d been thinking about writing a shapeshifter story, but hadn’t yet settled on what kind.

As it happened, though, I’d been getting quite the education on trans* and genderqueer issues thanks to author M Jules Aedin, with whom I chat frequently via instant message. It was a lot of information that I still had yet to process completely, and I think I was looking for a way to process it the best way I know how: writing.

So I had the shape-shifting thing bouncing around in my head, plus everything Jules and I had discussed, and as plot bunnies often do, they crashed into each other. Mightily. By the time I pulled into the mall parking lot about twenty minutes after I left my apartment, Alex and Damon had names, the plot was more or less in place, and the story had a title. I think I spent a good two hours frantically scribbling down ideas while my lunch got cold and my Coke went flat. I couldn’t stop.

And somewhere in my deluded, misguided brain, I was sure this story would be easy to write because its plot had fallen together so effortlessly.

Oh. LOL. Easy. Right. About that…

Originally, the plan was to write the entire story from Damon’s POV. Looking back, that doesn’t really make sense, but at the time, I think I was a little intimidated by the idea of getting into Alex’s head. Without firsthand knowledge of being genderfluid, genderqueer, trans*, or anything similar, I didn’t have a lot of faith in my ability to make Alex real.

Three chapters in, it was pretty obvious: Alex’s voice had to be heard, or the story wouldn’t work.  So I started over, this time alternating between Alex and Damon.

In some ways, writing from Alex’s POV was far easier than I expected. Just stop and imagine what would happen if you woke up tomorrow morning as a different gender. How would you feel? How would your co-workers react? What would you to do try to hide, alleviate, or otherwise cope with the situation? How would you feel if you were in the body of the wrong gender, and someone tried to flirt with you? If someone made you this way, how would you react toward those responsible? Those scenes came much easier than I thought they would, because I could pretty easily envision how Alex and the world would interact.

For many of the same reasons, writing from Alex’s POV was a lot harder than I expected. You see, I like making my characters suffer. Like many authors, I’m a freaking sadist when it comes to my characters. I cackle gleefully as I come up with new and innovative ways to make their lives hell. Oh yes, they’ll get their happy ending, but they will work for it.

It was different with Alex. I didn’t want it to be easy for him, but there was something oddly painful about what I was putting him through. I can’t explain it. I’ve been sitting here for fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to articulate it, but I can’t. I guess in a way, even though I’m not trans* or genderqueer myself, something about it struck a nerve I didn’t even know I had.

And if I’d originally thought Damon’s POV was the easy way out, I quickly learned that wasn’t the case. There’s a fine line between struggling to cope with a bomb your partner has dropped and being a jackass about it. Damon’s a sweet, compassionate guy, but he had to walk that line a few times because…I mean, who is really wired to cope gracefully with something shocking? He tried, bless his heart, but it wasn’t easy for him, and he made some mistakes.

About three weeks after the story dropped into my head, Static was finished. Now, at this point, I was confident I’d gotten the story right, but there’s a lot of material relating to bigender, gender-fluid, and transgender people, and my biggest fear was that somewhere along the line, I’d screwed something up. Inadvertently using a negative stereotype. Misrepresenting someone. That sort of thing.

I usually have one or two betas look over a story if I have concerns about it. This time, I had nine, most of them transgender or genderqueer. With their help (and oh my God, they were all amazing!) I corrected a few minor issues, and the book was done. Shortly after that, Amber Quill Press picked it up, and here we are!

All in all, it was one of the most intense and difficult writing experiences I’ve ever had, and it was also incredibly enlightening. I can’t imagine dragging a character through something like that without learning a thing or two about people and about gender identity. It started out as a way to process everything I’d recently learned about gender, and it worked. In the end, I finally made sense of everything Jules had taught me, and came away with a better understanding of what trans* and genderqueer people deal with.

And of course, as is always my hope, a story my readers will enjoy.

_

L.A. has generously offered two paperback copies of Static (which she modestly neglected to mention was a finalist in two categories in this year’s Lambda Literary Awards).  Comment for a chance to win.  Don’t forget to include your email address, please, so that we can contact you if you win.

Edit: You’ve got until midnight Eastern time on Wednesday to get your comments in.  After that I’ll close the comments and pick the winners.  Good luck!

Gay coming out narratives are now largely contained to young adult fiction, reflecting the age group largely and near exclusively directly affected by that developmental step.

Bromances and ‘playing gay’ have become selling points of modern culture, be it TV shows or popbands (One Direction more or less famously get accused of pandering to a slash-hungry teengirl generation with stage-gay antics, but they’re hardly the only or the first ones — and how much that is play or real is up to the people involved to disclose). What that means, how much it is appropriation and objectification is up for debate, but what it does do is turn gay narratives into narratives with gay elements that exist alongside narratives with straight elements. Media and (Western, educated, urban, popculture) society reflect gay not so much as a separate identity but as a variation of identity full stop.

These days (adult) fiction sees a push towards fiction that isn’t so much gay fiction as it is fiction with gay characters, i.e. characters who are gay but stories whose plots don’t revolve around the gayness and associated drama. Sheer frequency of popstars, characters, etc. being gay leads to a normalization and somewhat a de-issue-ization that does get reflected, or is beginning to be reflected, in mainstream literature content.

We’re not quite at a point where you can walk into Foyles or Barnes & Noble or scroll through the general fiction listing on Amazon and expect to find gay main characters alongside straight main characters near interchangeably, but I believe we’ll get there fairly soon.

So that’s gay fiction, which, I think is fair to say, makes up the largest part in the LGBTQI fiction pie. Now, in analogy, trans* fiction is probably on a very similar trajectory, albeit twenty years behind and in much lower numbers and subdued enthusiasm — I suppose trans* isn’t quite as sexy as ‘gay’.

The narrative in trans* fiction I grew up with is very much the death and suicide one which hit roundabout the 90s. Before then everything was kind of a variation of blokes being gay anyway, dressing up as women and all that lark. It’s only in the 90s that, largely thanks to the gay movement dissociating from all things trans*, matters got split a bit more by letters. The distinction is important, trans* issues may overlap with LGB issues but they’re not congruent, and much like some LGB folks are mystified by all things trans*, plenty of straight trans* folks want little to do with the LGB scene.

The first trans* movies I watched were Ma Vie En Rose (the first major poem I wrote was inspired by it) and Boys Don’t Cry. The former is a surprisingly gentle child-focused French movie, the latter is semi-biographical and ends in rape and death and is probably the one that is more reflective of general media reporting of the time. The only time I really heard the term transsexual was when a trash TV station did a report on the “perversions” of the red light district. The dearth of information in society in general led to a dearth in stories, and if there were stories, they were the tragic, sad, suicidal ones. Searching for information about transsexuality online led you to the stories of largely trans women trying to live their identities and lives in an extremely hostile environment. Those were the narratives of fiction because those were the lives being lived.

It’s only now, and only in the last maybe two or three years, that the very stark, horrific storylines in trans* fiction or fiction about trans* people are being replaced by coming of age and coming out narratives as trans* rights and a certain trans* pride evolves, particularly online with a teen and twen generation of trans* folks who have their say. Luna was probably one of the first (mainstream) coming of age trans* novels out, then Parrotfish and Morgan in the Mirror, and more recently, with the advent of self-publishing leading to trans* folks typing up their memoirs and semi-autobiographical novels, stories like I Am J appear on the market (the trend towards the transmasculine end of the spectrum is interesting and probably deserving of some analysis). Romeos, a German movie about a gay transguy, and various trans* characters in soaps are the most recent almost mainstream attempts to talk about trans* issues.

Whereas gay coming of age fiction is all about that first love and that first crush and a bit of romance, trans* coming of age is about finding identity, passing, transitioning, coming out and sometimes, as a footnote, relationships. It’s fairly internalized fiction about the quiet moments, about dysphoria, about overcoming fears and going for it when just holding out doesn’t work anymore.

Whereas gay fiction is moving into the mainstream in such a way that gay characters can be main characters in mainstream fiction without turning the book into a gay fiction novel (getting there anyway), trans* fiction is still very much a very self-contained, very intimate, very issue-driven genre that hardly overlaps with the rest of LGBT fiction, much less mainstream (two exceptions are Lipshitz 6 by T Cooper and Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, both brilliant works).

I believe trans* fiction is a reflection of where society, and with it popular media, is at. It plays an important role for a lot of trans* identified folks and people trying to figure out how trans* folks tick (friends, family, partners, allies). There’s an unprecedented number of trans* people being out about being trans* and seeking treatment, being loud about being trans* and, with social media like tumblr and youtube, just showing a presence, which means there are an unprecedented number of potential writers and readers who are looking for something that reflects their lives and their conflicts and their struggles. And trans* fiction today does that, I believe, drawing up various narratives from childhood through adolescence with the final point the “now I am comfortably [insert gender]” as the fullstop at the end of the book.

What I’m missing though, and where I’d like trans* fiction to go, or maybe where I’d like trans* characters to go in non-trans* fiction, is everything else and everything non-trans*. Careers and love and sex, friendships and relationships and everything else that exists in genre or mainstream fiction that’s not concerned with trans* identities. Give me a guy on a spaceship going to war against an alien race, and oh yeah he’s got a vagina and has sex with the ship’s medic on the side.

Trans* fiction today is about trans* identities just like gay fiction is probably still primarily about gay identities, but neither sexual orientation nor gender identity are all there is to life. Much like gay characters have slipped into the mainstream as cops and lovers and firemen and popstars and whatever else people write about, I’d like to see more fiction with trans* characters that isn’t trans* fiction, that doesn’t reduce people to one aspect of their identity as if all conflict and struggle in their life is solely born out of their gender identity and how it matches or doesn’t match their body. I do believe trans* characters deserve to be more than footnotes in a book about cis characters, but I also believe trans* characters deserve to be more than just trans* especially when they’re the main characters in their own story.

Stories about trans* identity are important stories to tell but I don’t think they’re the only stories to tell, and currently they’re (largely) the only stories being told. A lot of this is down to a) the point of the trajectory we’re on, b) that those issues need to be fully explored before writers move on to look at people on a grander scale, c) the sheer quantity (rather lack thereof) of fiction with trans* characters being written (… and there’s probably a few more I’m forgetting here).

But where I’d like things to go, personally, as someone who is into blokes shagging other blokes, is being able to pick up gay erotica and read trans* blokes alongside cis blokes, with or without dicks, doing whatever people in gay erotica stories do. I want to pick up a book and read about the suburban mom making it work with the schoolrun and suburban life and her husband’s ex-wife, and maybe hey, a mystery on the side because mysteries are cool, and have the fact that she’s a trans woman be a footnote that shows up in the sex maybe, or in the background threaded in. I want trans* folks to be, you know, folks who don’t need the qualifier because it’s a non-issue, because they’re just a variation of people, gay or straight or bi or whatever they might be.

We’re a long way from that, but… in the meantime… in this little subgenre we have going here, if anyone wants to write me those kind of stories, I’d read them, you know? Because trans* folks deserve the same amount of adventure and romance and military action, spying and sporting and modern suburbia, that anyone else gets. They deserve to be more than the word qualifier used to identify them.

I wanted to start with disclaimers, but I’m going to end with them instead. The trans* spectrum is an incredibly varied spectrum of people and identities. Starting with gender identities that span absolutely every variation and centrality of gender and gender/biological body match, all variations of dysphoria associated with it, choices and the lack of choice to transition socially, legally and medically and to which degree, going on to sexual orientations, then sexual preferences and activities, lifestyles, involvement in the trans* community, use of adjectives and descriptors to present their identity, the degree to which their trans* identity is central to their lives at any point in their lives, and the diversity in the rest of their lives in status, health, ethnic background and community, etc — all of whom influence who people are.

What I wrote above will probably have some people on the spectrum (and some outside of it, no doubt) heatedly disagree because they don’t see themselves (their friends, partners, acquaintances) in any of it. Please feel free to add to this in the comments, as to the kind of stories you’d want to see for trans* characters or in trans* fiction, what you get out of fiction that includes trans* characters and why you seek, or maybe don’t, seek it out. I just wanted to offer one opinion that informs how I write and why I write what I write in the way I write it. Basically, this is where I’m coming from, but I’m curious to hear where others are coming from, and I expect it’ll be as diverse as the LGBTQI community + allies is in general.

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Elyan Smith lives in the southwest of England. He works in research during the day and spends most of his free time writing LGBT fiction. Elyan’s debut release, Portside, is out now and available from Riptide Publishing (excerpt and details at the link). You can find him at www.elyansmith.com and www.twitter.com/ElyanSmith.